S21A0050
S21A0050
Many icy bodies in our solar system, such as Europa and Enceladus, are likely to contain oceans underneath their icy shell, and could harbor conditions suitable for life beyond Earth. Cassini spacecraft has found various non-water volatiles, hydrocarbons and organic molecules in water plume spewing from Enceladus. Also several plumes at the southern limb of Europa have been just confirmed several times, and only water molecules have been identified through transit observations in ultraviolet with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Here, we propose to investigate whether or not the plume activities occur temporally, using a combination of L-band high-dispersion spectroscopy with adaptice optics. This high-spatial and -dispersion spectroscopy allows us to perform line-by-line analysis and suppress contamination of bright telluric thermal background. Even if the plume activity is not detected, we will place an upper mass limit with ten times better sensitivity than Paganinni et al. (2019). We also aim to detect non-water volatiles and organic molecules from the Europa plumes. This provides a clue for understanding whether or not the subsurface liquid ocean is reducing like the Earth’s ancient ocean.
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